There will be a lot of altruisms today about mental health, but few people are looking at systems change and the cultural shift work that is required to create real communities of care. Instead, you’ll see a lot of social media posts. And there will be a lot of memes and info graphs linked to campaigns. I applaud those who are sharing their stories of vulnerability. I applaud those efforts that encourage others to support and raise awareness about seeking professional health. However to truly address Mental Health we must take a multi-pronged approach that increases access, develop better support systems to help individuals heal, look internally to develop healthier interpersonal skills, and be committed to systems change.

Reducing stigma is a wonderful step, but we overlook the challenges of access. There are challenges of coming up with the money for co-pay, of finding time for people who have to work long hours, transportation, child care, etc. Some are still uninsured. And for those of us who are self insured or have pre-existing conditions, there is a special dread to the gutting of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Before ACA, I spent thousands out of pocket to a counselor. Over the years, I spent thousands in co-pays, money I had the luxury to spend. Caring for our emotional, psychology, and behavioral health can be a daunting journey. And as someone reminded me it is a deeply spiritual journey. Going to a counselor once a month or even twice a month helps, but it is not a silver bullet.

We can’t fixate on fixing individuals when it is society that is making us sick and maladapted. Also, it is society that makes the world an intolerable place for neuroatypical people. Michel Foucault elaborates on this in Madness and Civilization: A Hisotry of Insantiy in the Age of Reason Nueroatypical were not seen as productive in a capitalist society, they were locked away. In the 80’s the asylums like the one not far from my childhood home were closed. The residents were often cast out and when their families could not support their care they became our homeless and wound up in our criminal justice system. But in indigenous cultures, there was always a place for those who experience reality differently. This notion that an individual can lift themselves up by their emotional bootstraps, even if under the onslaught of modernity the stress of being productive, of consuming, of being isolated is indeed from a neoliberal mindset.

One of the things about Western medical practices is that it often focuses on the individual. But it takes families, it takes communities, it takes systems of support. That Our neighbors and family members could have helped the process, but they didn’t. They just watched from their windows or from a distance. My mother struggled caring for my brother who had a shattered hip and elbow. She had an infant, her toddler grandchild, me as a teen. I was in junior high when I had to take time off of school to watch his daughter as my mother made trips over the Santa Cruz mountains. For three days they said he wouldn’t make it. Then after months in the hospital, they said he wouldn’t walk. But he did. It took all of us for his recovery from hip surgery four years after his hips fused from bone spurs. That is what I found so powerful in anthropologist historian Steven Feireman’s work on therapeutic pluralism. He discusses the importance of kinfolk and neighbors in therapy. In many traditional societies, healing work whether physical therapy or psycho-somatic entailed communities.

Similarly, mental health is not an individual problem. It is a problem of communities, families, organizations, and work cultures. I’ve studied a lot of ethnographies on Islamic courts or conflict resolution, and so much of it was about repairing relationships. They still had to be in community together. In my journey I have experienced the promise and the frustrations of our lack of systems of care. I have personally experienced cruelty and been treated with contempt during the most challenging of times. I have faced that when my aunt died in 2015, when my best friend from high school died from cancer in 2016, when facing postpartum depression and countless other times. This is because it is much easier to articulate the need to be caring to others, but much more difficult to care for individuals who might call us into account for power, race, gender disparities and hold those of us who are more privileged and have access to resources to manage their our care to a higher standard. The one that needed fixing and adjusting is often the one who is subordinated. I was to be fixed to be silenced, to only share those thoughts in tahajjud prayer or with a counselor, otherwise in silence. Individuals who have power/privilege often don’t look at their own toxic patterns of socialization and how that need to maintain internalized superiority destroys all of our well being.

As I tread water and forge my own community of care, I know I have failed others who are drowning. And I am sorry. I’ve had to direct others who faced sexual violence, incest, abuse, emotional collapse to better resources. I’ve been complicit in trying to keep myself afloat and not reaching out to create the community of care I need by being there for them. My well-being is wrapped up in community and family and being able to be loving, sensitive and caring without coercion or control. My community of care needs to be a cultivation of relationships built on trust, as well as duties, and rights that are inspired by the Prophetic teachings.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that there are times when I felt the weight lifted off of me. That has been in justice spaces, in organizational leadership trainings, and in Muslim women’s support groups where I have felt the most seen and heard and experienced the most healing. The connection I’ve experienced during my work at Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC) helped maintain my belief that we could embody faith principles by taking a stark look at patterns of thought and behaviors that alienated ourselves from our true selves and interrupt patterns of harmful communication. It has been difficult work. And I feel that I have a roadmap for compassion.

As I am on the path of healing and building, it is essential that I keep a view of mental health as a justice issue with systems change in mind. We must move beyond the moral platitudes.It has to be transformative work on an individual and systemic way. We cannot perpetuate harm on individuals who are marginalized. We must take deep looks at ourselves to avoid stigmatizing others, making them question their lived reality, shaming them for speaking their truth, avoiding them because they make us uncomfortable. We must participate in the healing of others. We must work to redress the harm we might have caused because that will help their healing. We must reach sincerely to those who are most isolated and build real communities where we care for each other. We must look within, give generously to support individuals to get the treatment they deserve, and fight to open up access through policy and advocacy.

“First, I need to tell you who I am,” is how Somali Canadian researcher Hodan Mohamedopens her response to Faisal Kutty’s critique of Black Panther (2018). Mohamed then demonstrates her qualifications to speak on both Islamophobia and anti-Blackness. She writes, “I am an educator, researcher with a focus on diversity and inclusion, curriculum development, public engagement, immigration, and Criminal Justice System working with underserved and underemployed Black youth in Toronto.” Like so many other Black women, Black Muslim women have to establish our credentials just to be taken seriously in any discussion. Black women experts are often dismissed by people who lack cultural competence or knowledge of the field. In this case, we should pay careful attention to the writings and thoughts of Black women. While much of my graduate work from 2004-2008 focused on colonial surveillance of Muslim communities in Northern Nigeria, as an African American Muslim I do not speak for Nigeria. But I hope to highlight important voices we should listen to in discussions on why Black Panther’s #BringBackOurGirls rescue operation was important and point to better ways at responding to our discomfort. The debate about Islamophobia in Black Panther highlights intra-Muslim racial power dynamics, where the Black Muslim issues and concerns are subsumed for the sake of a monolithic ummah.

This picture was in 2017 featuring recently released Chibok girls meeting with President Buhari. Today, 100 of the Chibok girls remain missing.

Roughly half of Nigeria’s 186 million population are Muslim, and 40% Christian and 10% indigenous African faiths. According to a 2015 Pew study with the top 10 largest Muslim populations, Nigeria ranks the 5th ahead of Egypt. Nigeria’s Muslim population is largely concreted in the North of Nigeria. Boko Haram, whose name “Western education is forbidden,” brazen abducted of 276 girls from their school in the north eastern Nigerian town of Chibok. Obiageli Ezekwesili, former minister of Education in Nigeria and Vice President of the African Division of the World Banks founded Bring Back our Girls and according to the website, “. It spread to social media via the millions of Nigerians and Nigerian-Americans on twitter who were joined by social justice advocates all over the world.” It then went on to become one of the largest social media campaigns. Black Panther includes a brief scene where the soon to be crowned King of Wakanda, T’Challa extracts Nakia who is in on a spy mission in the Simbasa jungle where Boko Haram hides out. Daniel Oruba writes Black Panther executive producer, Nate Moore explains the purpose for the scene:

The notion that Wakanda exists, has all these resources, and is in Africa — a continent that is plagued by conflict of different kinds — we knew we wanted to tell a story of whether or not they’d feel a sense of responsibility.

And [missing Chibok girls] is a conflict that is unfortunately still ongoing. We wanted them to come face to face with a real thing.

We would have been cheapening what Wakanda meant if we didn’t tackle that, because this is a real thing that people should be aware of if they are not. We didn’t want to exploit it, we wanted to shine a light on it.

Nigerians of all faith were elated when the Black Panther paid homage to an issue that their nation was still grappling with.

*spoiler alert*, but its Monday so y'all had time cuz. As a Nigerian, I was touched to see the #bringbackourgirls nod. It moved me to tears. If only it could be that easy. I appreciate Ryan Coogler even more #blackpanther

While Nigerians celebrated the inclusion of Boko Haram, some Muslims living in the West felt uncomfortable that a Muslim led insurgency was mentioned at all in the Box office record breaking film.

I think that to reduce it to that allows us to miss a bigger point in even placing the scene there. I wasn’t disappointed. I was uncomfortable, because a movie had to remind me about #BringBackOurGirls.

Kutty writes, “The scene inadvertently reinforces what colonial studies experts such as University of Toronto Professor Sherene Razack call the stereotypes of the barbaric Muslim man, oppressed Muslim woman and imperilled non-Muslim.” Some people were upset that the kidnapper used wallah, a Hausa word and kefiyyas, something that Boko Haram members frequently wear. A Muslim chaplain Sami Aziz wrote in Medium that the film didn’t show the balanced portrayal of Muslims. However, one of the rescued offered Islamic prayers and said Allah. Others pointed to the rescued girls taking off their scarves. While girls threw off the large scarf but still wore small head coverings more akin to traditional clothing of the region.

However, the response amongst some non-Black Muslims was pointedly different than that of Nigerians. For about a decade, a toxic ideology, disintegration of traditional Islamophic authority tied to indigenous African institutions, and collapse of the state has led to Boko Haram. The two minute scene explored sex trafficking and child soldiers, two war crimes that fuel groups like Boko Haram and the Lord’s Resistance Army (which was a warped version of Christianity). Asha Noor, a Somali American community organizer who works on Islamophobia in Michigan says:

It may not be the best depiction, but it is accurate. But in the movie, it was dealt with by Africans. That is the ideal way of how issues should be dealt with in Africa should be handled, rather intervention from outsiders. Now all these South Asians and Arabs complaining about the depiction about something that has happened and is happening. But they’ve been silent. You need to be the number one advocate for girls taken by Boko Haram.

What makes it even more tragic is that while the depiction of Muslims behaving badly embarasses us Muslims in the West, we are not uplifting the voices of Nigerians who have been affirmed or the stories of the victims of Boko Haram atrocities.

The Muslim derailing of Black Panther is reminiscent of 2014, when Middle Eastern activists derailed MIchelle Obama’s signal boost of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag. Instead centering Black girls who were lost, Muslim twitter centered Pakistan, Yemen, and some threw in Somalia to be inclusive. Four years later, many of the girls haven’t found their way home. And just the week alone, 100 more school girls have been kidnapped. Likewise, our discomfort with negative depiction of Muslims keeps our communities from supporting local communities facing real and imminent threat.

This raises the question, what makes something Islamophobic? The Islamophobia Research & Documentation project explains that Islamophobia was was first introduced in 1991 to mean “unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.” The website provide a working definition:

Islamophobia is a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure. It is directed at a perceived or real Muslim threat through the maintenance and extension of existing disparities in economic, political, social and cultural relations, while rationalizing the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve “civilizational rehab” of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise). Islamophobia reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended.

How are some films that depict conflict in Muslim communities Islamophobic and some not? Just because something makes us uncomfortable doesn’t make it Islamophobic. Like Hodan Mohamed, numerous Black Muslim thought leaders contend that the scene was not Islamophobic. The scene spoke to a real issue that is affecting communities in the region. Dawud Walid, who has been in the forefront of addressing Islamophobia in Michigan also shared his thoughts on the film,

#BlackPanther wasn’t “Islamophobic” to me at all. I saw a beautifully complex storyline inspired by spirituality and a mix of beautiful tribal expressions with deep meaning. Fictional names were substituted to show actual realities.

Why are some non-Black Muslims focused on this aspect of the film, rather than centering Nigerian narratives or even the narrative of the film? Layla Poulos proposed, “Perhaps they couldn’t relate to all those Black bodies.” Asha Noor, the pointed out, “You don’t have them attacking other Marvel white centered films for their anti-Muslim depictions. They don’t see themselves in T’Challa, and they don’t aspire to be part of that. So all you have is critique. They just stress me out. I don’t have time for that.” Those arguing that the film is Islamophobic are pitting Black Muslims against their two identities. To watch the film, they have to wrestle with whether celebrating this moment is betraying their faith. It truly is exhausting when non-Black Muslims excercise their cultural capital to speak for all of us, and derail important conversations that Black Muslim should be having.

As Dawud Walid pointed out there was a lot of Islamic imagery, including homage to the great mosque of Djene. In Wakanda there were numerous representations of Muslim cultural identity including but not limited to Fulbe, Wolof, Tuareg, Hausa, and Mandinke. These included certain robes tied to Muslim clerical linages, Sahelian/Sudanese cultural elements including dress and architecture, pendants that many Africans wear that hold verses of the Qur’an,and names that evoke Muslim identities. Costume designer Ruther Carter highlights that the Tuareg were important in representing the merchant tribe. Some of these Muslim elements reflected in the Pan-African imagery of Wakanda go largely undetected by people unfamiliar with West African or Sudano/Sahelian cultures. Black Muslims showed up to the film wearing their traditional African garb, and they were welcomed and embraced by their kinfolk of all faiths.

Following the publication of the Kutty’s article and the viral social media post, some Muslims, mostly from South Asian and Middle Eastern heritage, said that they were boycotting the movie. I don’t think that my essay would sway them to watching the film. Nor is that necessarily my interest. What makes this tragic is that the Black Panther could do a great deal in uprooting anti-Blackness and starting difficult conversations in our faith community. It happens to be that Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslim communities have long histories of anti-Blackness, narratives and depictions that date back to trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade, which are now exacerbated by global white supremacy, and model minority narratives as strategies for assimilation in the West.

Kutty’s article didn’t reference Africanist scholars or even Northern Nigerian Muslims who would be directly impacted by the film. Had he done so, then perhaps his article would have opened up nuanced discussions about Islam in Africa, African Islam, and Black Orientalism. But to do that, one would have to dig a bit deeper, to do so would mean to recognize the rich 1400 years of Islam in Africa and the agency of Black Muslim voices in practicing and interpreting their faith. With a film on track to reach one billion in sales, as Muslims we are not seizing the opportunity to increase awareness about #BringBackOurGirls and even raise funds to support Boko Haram’s victims. Instead, we are arguing about how it makes Muslims look. This is stressful. It is tiring. And ain’t nobody got time for that.

I offer up a few to people who are not Black watching the film.

Be humble and don’t argue. Especially with Black Muslims or Africans about the film. This is especially the case if your opinion is contested by scholars, organizers, activists and leaders whose work is on the front lines of addressing anti-Blackness and Islamophobia or they are Africanist scholars. When exploring the complexities of our multiple identities, Black Muslim voices should not be subsumed in service of a “monolithic” ummah. Within the framework of cultural competency, that is akin to cultural destructiveness.

Evaluate your implicit bias. If your main take away was that one short scene where one group of bad guy may have perhaps claimed the same religion as you, maybe you need to explore some of your ability to relate to Black characters. One place to start is the Black-White implicit association testhttps://implicit.harvard.edu/ . If you’re not happy with the results, the test isn’t wrong. It means you have to do some work to interrupt that bias.

Lean into the discomfort you feel in that film. De-center yourself and how your identity groups are depicted in the film. This may be the time when you have to explore where you identities are privileged and targeted. It may not be fun to recognize that your faith identity may be oppressive to other groups (i.e. women, religious minorities in Muslim majority societies, people whose societies were raided and traffic to fuel the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade for 1400 years); It’s called intersectionality.

Read #BlackMuslimReads. This would be the time to start exploring African scholarship on Orientalism, African Islam, and Islam in Africa. I offer up my bibliography on race and slavery in Muslim societieshttps://margariaziza.com/info-and-resources/race-and-slavery-in-muslim-societies-bibliography/. This would be the time to dive into the works of Black American scholars like Sherman Jackson, Dawud Walid, or Su’ad Abdul Khabeer who lare experts in Black orientalism to see if your take has some basis

Get trained. Sign up for anti-racism training course. MuslimARC offers some to help provide you with some critical cultural competency and a shared language to understand many of the issues of power, cultural domination, and narrative shift. We hope you take this as an opportunity to begin a long journey of collective liberation.

I was in the mountains at a training retreat when Black Panther (2018) was released in theaters. So I only glimpsed the initial reviews during intermittent breaks in my program. My consolation was that in the thin crisp mountain air, I had time to work with brilliant leaders of color and reflect on my leadership strengths. It was just a movie, I told myself. I could geek out on getting to root causes of social problems in the Inland Empire, drawing on the historical context of the rise of the nation state and white supremacy. As an anti-racism educator I draw upon my strength of historical context, as well as my others strengths in strategy, learning, input, and connection to dream, plan, and build a multi faith multiracial world that could be. I have done that since I was a child, first with a notebook and colored pencils, then with a typewriter, a word processor, a desktop, then a laptop. I used those skills to dream, plan, and build imaginary worlds. Science fiction and fantasy writers often created worlds where someone like me would never exist. I sketched and wrote to create my own stories with characters who were idealized versions of people who looked like my multi-hued family. Watching Black Panther, felt like a long awaited home coming. It was an epic, a fantasy, an Afro-futuristic world that gave life to my unrealized dreams.

Over the past two weeks, I had to swallow a lot of envy as I couldn’t get away from work or obligations to find time to watch the film. Meanwhile, my timeline lit up with my friends and associates seated on Wakandan thrones, going in large groups and decked out in their finest traditional and African inspired clothing. I too had been waiting for some time. My interest in Black Panther came largely through the first Black woman superhero, Storm. I came to know her through the X-men cartoons. In the cartoon, she was beautiful, powerful, magical, cold, and aloof. She was also cut off from her culture. She was always alone. Who loved the gorgeous and powerful Storm? Who loves the magical black girls, the darkly hued warrior women? Over a decade ago, I walked into a comic book store and the cover art answered my question. It was Black Panther. I didn’t know much about him. But rendering of the marriage of Storm and Black Panther took my breath away. A decade later I became reacquainted as Prince T’Challa appeared with his female bodyguards in Marvel’s Civil War. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was on twitter at the time, announced that he was writing the series. Acclaimed author Roxanne Gay wrote the Worlds of Wakanda spin off series. Even though it was a big deal, I had no idea how big it would get.

Chancellor Williams didn’t pull any punches

Nor did I realize how profound Black Panther would be for me. As a child, I was fed the National Geographic gaze of Africans and I was ashamed of my own history. It wasn’t until I went to high school, and began reading Black nationalist, Pan-African, and revolutionary writings that I started to gain a sense of self, my own history and pride in my roots. Some of the first books I read right after I graduated high school set my journey to become Muslim. The most significant books were Chancellor William’s The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race Between 4500 B.C. and 2000 A.D. and the FBI files of Malcolm X. Becoming Muslim at 18 was not just a leap to faith, it was a leap to embracing my full identity as a daughter of the African Diaspora. My study of Muslims and the pre-modern world gave me a glimpse of what cosmopolitanism could look like outside of white supremacy. As a young person who newly became Muslim, I dove into medieval Arabic literature. I found texts and historical accounts that countered the egalitarian message that I embraced when I became Muslim. When I transferred to a four year college in 1998, I embarked on a long journey to understand racial formation in Muslim societies, Islam in Africa, and Black identities in the Middle East. Because they didn’t need written language, outside the Arabic literature in sub-Saharan Africa, we don’t have many written accounts of African societies without slave raiding or under threat from a foreign hegemony.

The Black Panther film was so rich for me, as a child of Diaspora and a scholar of African history. Africanists often do thought experiments to imagine what could be. Walter Rodney inspired us deeply to think about the underdevelopment. What if whole regions weren’t depopulated as sons and daughters weren’t carried off? What if the railways were built to connect African cities, rather than export raw resources to Europe, Asia, and the Americas? What if mass deaths didn’t occur and Africa was allowed to develop without the influence of colonialism and now neoliberal policies? What if toxic strains of foreign ideologies hadn’t bred internalized racism and dehumanization of other tribes, faiths, or nations?

All of this is some heady stuff for an action film. So many Black women intellectuals have written amazing pieces, such as “Black women ‘never freeze’” by Dara Mathis there is even a #BlackPantherSyllabus and #WakandanSyllabus. During this cultural moment, while Black folks globally are having deep discussions and more petty debates about who has a right to wear daishikis, some of my co-religionists take umbrage to a 2 minute scene involving Boko Haram and called the film Islamophobic. It is akin to the derailing of the viral #BringBackOurGirls campaign, where some Middle East activists used the hashtag to critique Michelle Obama. Sadly, this week Boko Haram has kidnapped a dozen school girls. While I’m basking in Vanta Blackness, I don’t want my celebration to be derailed. So I’ll save my discourse analysis for another day. But I hope that the film raises awareness to drum up support for African led initiatives to combat Boko Haram. If only there was a Nakia to help bring those girls home. In the meantime, more of you can spend time learning about African history, reading African literature, and uprooting the anti-Black racism that your communities have been complicit in. We should also be more open to the deeper messages in the film and focus our energies on that. A visionary place like Wakanda can show us that the Black imagination is key for collective liberation.

As grandma Sara’s memory fades, what remains are the stories she told us. My three other grandparents died by the time I was five and all I am left with are memories of the stories my mother told me about them. I was in graduate school when I gathered enough courage to ask grandma Sara what it was like when she was young in Jim Crow South. She recounted the fear she felt when encountering groups of white men on those country roads. She told me about her father, Carlos Hilton, the farmer who had the courage to stand up against white men who wanted to take what was his. “He didn’t take no mess,” she said proudly. He eventually migrated North because the threat of lynchings. Facing daily threats of violence and degradation, I wonder, how did my ancestors survive Jim Crow and slavery? What inner source of power gave them the fortitude to carry on? Reflecting on accounts of Bilal ibn Rabah’s life, I am finding my own strength in embracing struggle and in finding hope through unity.

My Great Grandfather Carlos Hilton

There are times when I have to dig deep to find meaning in Black suffering, in the broken lives of those who were forgotten. With the barrage of headlines, from African migrants enslaved in Libya, genocide against the Rohingya, and exploitation of farm workers, it’s tempting to spiral down into a dark place. Earlier this week, I tweeted:

As I thought about the forgotten names, I also began to think about how could I reclaim my own history. Recently, I began searching through online records to trace my family’s genealogy. My great great grandfather was six years old, my daughter’s age, when slavery was abolished. She is now learning how to read, something that would have been forbidden to many of my enslaved ancestors. Could he have imagined me teaching college courses, my writings being used in high school textbooks? Could he have imagined that his descendant would stand below Lincoln’s portrait Presidents reside? What type of future did my great great grandfather dare to imagine?

The archive doesn’t reveal the dreams of the enslaved, the freed men and women, the day laborers, the domestics, and the farmers who made up much of my family. But my paternal grandmother shows up in the archive, as an entry on a 1940s census as a border whose occupation is a maid. Another entry, my step grandfather is listed as a chauffeur. I called my mother and got enough information to locate my maternal grandfather, a 9-year-old boy living with his uncle Simon Grant in Pensacola, Florida. The census lists my grandfather as “M” for mulatto and his uncle’s family as “B” for Black. Some would later say that my grandfather was Native American. Better that myth than carrying the shame of sexual violence. Could that have been why he was sent to live with his uncle? From Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia, they migrated North from their place of birth in search of opportunity and safety. What was the one dream that kept members of my family going?

I ask these questions knowing that no matter what the circumstances, every person experiences the full range of emotions. Even without the indignities of racial oppression, we all experience sadness, alienation, disconnection, and at times despair. Our world is broken and many of us have few paths to make a difference. But through storytelling, we are uplifted by heroic stories that illustrate our highest potential. My family’s exodus from the South echoes that Biblical tales of freedom. Yet a Black hero or heroine is hardly ever farmed as a universal character.

So, a Hollywood Celebration of an enslaved man of African descent who lived 1400 years ago seemed like such an unlikely event. But it did happen this past Tuesday. I sat in an audience watching the #BilalMovie with a mixture of actors, entertainment leaders, Los Angeles activists, and creatives. For Black American Muslims whose cultural identity is tied to enslavement, Bilal ibn Rabah takes on deep meaning. He is such a dear figure to my faith community in general. Stories of the Sahabi often cause me to weep. I was moved to see people of all faiths and backgrounds being touched by Bilal’s struggle against persecution. That event spoke to the power of storytelling, connecting people from diverse backgrounds. All the forces that brought us together in that moment, all the efforts that put things in motion and there we were. It was the power of one word, the encouragement of one person, that one gesture, that one story which moved us in a new direction. Things put in motion long before Bilal ibn Rabah was born and would continue long after. Slavery, genocide, and war are destroying lives today. And there is something we can do to ease the suffering of the most vulnerable. Whenever I feel weak and broken and that I can’t bear the burden any more, I imagine the prayers, hopes, and aspirations of my ancestors. I find my strength in moving towards that vision by my belief in one humanity, one earth, and one God. For me, that is the #PowerOfOne.

This Black History Month 2018 Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC) and Muslim Matters are collaborating to host a Blog Carnival on #ThePowerOfOne. Please join us to share your personal reflections and thoughts, articles, videos, and art on Bilal Ibn Rabah. What does the Power of One mean to you?

As a Muslim, we are taught to avoid icons or idols. I’ve taught various courses in Islamic history and am deeply aware that this human tendency to create idols happened over and over again in Muslim societies. That is because of the human tendency to imbue objects with supernatural powers to intercede in human affairs on our behalf, rather than call upon an abstract, and seemingly unknowable, Ultimate Reality. Similarly, we ascribe super human powers to movement leaders, rather than address the complex social systems. Thus we create icons of leaders like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and now Oprah Winfrey.

Image source: Reuters

When we take leaders outside of their social context, and just focus on their rousing speeches, we do ourselves a disservice. The calls for Oprah Winfrey to run for president after given a powerful #TimesUp speech at the Golden Globes is the latest example of icon worship over personal work. Rousing speeches may inspire us, especially when we need to boost our morale for the hard work ahead. But the rousing speeches and public actions do not replace the transformative work of relationship building, of service to community, or sacrifice for the collective good. A powerful speech does not uproot longstanding norms, policies, and social practices that cause gendered vulnerabilities. No one woman, no matter how many Billions can change this society. Focusing on the icons prevents us from seeing how social change happens.

This week, we are celebrating Martin Luther King Day. The popular images of the Civil Rights Movement tend to focus on the March on Washington. We imagine the marches as a sign of mass mobilization. Our minds don’t shift to the organizing, the fundraising which was done by working class and poor Black folks who maintained the movement work. We don’t think about debates into the long hours, the marathon strategizing sessions, the rigorous training sessions to prepare Black youth to stare down white supremacist violence. Few of us think about Ella Baker or Fannie Lou Hamer who maintained that movement. No, we give the Civil Rights an icon and imagine that if we had one dope leader our world would be changed.

Fannie Lou Hamer, seated at left, at a meeting of the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, a union of black domestic workers and day laborers. Photograph courtesy The Tougaloo College Civil Rights Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History

It may be a stretch to call this a form of shirk, but a case can be made that it short circuits the faith-full work of getting to know one another, of working with people from different social and economic backgrounds to get stuff done. That’s the kind of work that the Sahabi (Companions of the Prophet Muhammad) and taba’een (Righteous Predecessors) did in Medinah. The focus on the icons keeps us from the responsibility of living our morality, our duty of caring and loving each human being and promoting dignity for each other. Focusing on the icon allows us to focus on adoring the image powerful leaders and less on the collective love we need to sustain our work. Anas ibn Malik reported: The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “None of you will have faith until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 13, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 45) The focus on the icon keeps us from actualizing that love in tangible acts that help our brothers and sisters live the dignified lives that we hope for ourselves. Of wanting for their children what we want for our children. Of realizing that their children are our children. And that we are in this together.

Note: this article is not to disparage Easter Orthodox Traditions, which utilize icons in profoundly meaningful ways.

A major sticking point in the Coates-West feud was the discussion of Barack Obama and Malcolm X in We Were Eight Years in Power. Given the chapter on Malcolm in Between the World and Me, I anticipated a thought experiment exploring what would Malcolm say about Barack Obama’s presidency. While that didn’t happen, after Cornel West published his bombastic critique, many Black intellectuals weighed in. And there were a lot of Malcolm references to talk about Malcolm’s internationalism, his critique of power, and even critiquing West for hanging out with Malcolm’s rival, Louis Farrakhan. Yet, all of these references failed to explore Malcolm #BeingBlackandMuslim and what did that mean during the Obama years. While valorizing Black Muslim heroes like Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X in their death, mainstream Black civil rights leaders, public figures and even activists act as if we are historical footnotes. We’re still here. Black American Muslims in Detroit, Minneapolis, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles were targeted by harmful policies during the Obama administration. We still are targeted, but our plight is often erased in Black spaces.

How do we write a whole book about Executive Power without talking about how that power was weilded against Black and Brown bodies in the U.S. and abroad? It’s a legit question that Muslim Americans had and one reason why aspects of West’s critique resonated with many us. During Obama’s administration there are segments of Black America that were subject to similar COINTELPRO policies that helped create the conditions for Malcolm’s assassination. It was during the Obama administration when imam Luqman Abdullah was killed by federal agents. Only the local Boston chapter of Black Lives Matter brought attention to Usaama Rahim’s killing. Often, when high profile Black activists, even radical ones, talk about Muslims they imagine they are talking about people “over there” or immigrants. Yet, one third of American Muslims are Black and we are especially targeted by National Security system and criminal justice system.

Given that climate of entrapment, career damaging investigations, and public drudging, many Black Muslims were highly critical of the Obama administration. Yet his symbolic victory was not lost on us. Nor was it lost on those of us who were invited to the first and likely last 2016 eid celebration at the White House that was hella Black.

#BlackOutEid

COINTELPRO is not a historical concept when you have informants in our spaces of worship, volunteering for your organization, and FBI agents showing up at your trainings. Nor is it a that far off when you have your whole community fighting about a partnership with DHS to investigate your own community. Drones and bombings are not an abstract concept when you have to comfort a mentor whose families members were obliterated by US made missile. Nor is the no fly list a abstract issue, when your key participant is detained at an airport and misses their flight to your event. Rendition or secret detention is not just a political thriller when you’re at a baby shower hugging a wife whose husband was disappeared in a foreign prison. Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer reminds us, we Black Americans need to contend with our relationship with empire. She had a simple but powerful letter to deliver to Obama that day.

We have to look at the tools and tactics that the main beneficiaries of white supremacy use to maintain their advantaged position. Sometimes, we are its tools. Just as we suffer in this country, we cannot turn away from the collateral damage of white supremacy. They are the undocumented laborers, the Black and Latino kids pipelined into prison, the indigenous people fighting for sovereignty and environmental sanctity. There are many who are getting crushed in the systemic mechanism, and it is not accidental. Their sweat, tears, and blood are being used as a lubricant for the gears to work together. If we cannot find another social lubricant, other than suffering, for the gears to move, then we must build better social mechanism that renders white supremacy irrelevant.

If Black public intellectuals are going truth tellers shining light on White Supremacy to massive audiences, then their light needs to multipronged and not cast those of us at the intersections into the shadows. This is why much of my focus last year was in making the connections. I sought to explore the ways in which the criminal justice system, immigration system, and national security system targets Black Muslims by bringing together organizers from Undocublack Network,Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Prison Education Project, Black Liberation Project, Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA), and more. I’m hoping that in 2018 Black kinfolk can work together more. I’ve been reaching out for the past few years, and I’m hoping that some of y’all respond to my call because we need our kinfolks now more than ever.

I stopped writing poetry and stories a long time ago. But recently, I was tasked to celebrate a high point in my life. I chose to write about my Pan African Student graduation in 2003. I still cry when I think about that day and the ten years it took me to get my degree, from DeAnza, to Foothill, to Santa Clara. There is much to be said, but sometimes through poetry or fiction we can say what can’t be said. So, here’s my poem:

Below ground in Ohlone land,
I was an interloper at a prestigious campus
In 1994, a community college drop out.
Searching shelves of tightly packed books
Reading authors whose quills were still wet as the
System connecting El Camino Real collapsed

Cum.
Laude.
Was possible.
Even with fits and restarts.
With failures and repeats.
Even with my world crumbling around me.
And so I earned my Kinte cloth—class of 2003.
While our kindred from the Motherland laugh at us
For making such pretentions
As wearing the cloth of kings.
But this struggle was noble.
And the imported cloth deepened its worth.
I had shed blood for this and it cost endless tears

I told my story, the daughter of a broken purple heart and
A pretty coloured girl whose teacher
Assured her Negros were of inferior intelligence.
I attained something that disproved their theories.
I am the child of the enslaved African
And the self loathing bastard who
Was a product of a violation.
I am the child of those who toiled
The soil from Georgia to Garden state
We could never have nothing. Not for long.
No, not even our bodies.
But this degree. Right here. They could never take that away.
For a moment, one brief moment, I felt free to breathe
Right there on Ohlone land.

Rules for Commenting

This is not a free speech zone.
I will not tolerate comments racist comments, those insulting Islam or any other faith. I will edit or delete comments with personal insults, foul language, slander, or offensive statements. My blog is for thoughtful and insightful discussion on difficult issues. It is for constructive dialogue and positive change. I appreciate your input, as long as it is respectful and well thought out (this includes preaching or making disparaging comments about this blogger or other commenters' character). If you would like to know why your comment was not accepted or have a grievance with how I treated your comment feel free to email me.

Copyright
Please do not copy and paste entire articles in other forums and emails. A short selection and link is more appropriate. If you would like for others to read the blog, please link back to my blog. I would like to know how did people discover my work. If you use a sentence or quote in my blog, please provide attribute the work to me.